


If We Knew Then Now What We Know

by ponderinfrustration



Series: Buckaroo Fringe [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, Gen, Melancholy, idle musings about life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-21
Updated: 2014-10-21
Packaged: 2018-02-22 01:20:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2489168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderinfrustration/pseuds/ponderinfrustration
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arizona, 1889</p><p>He’s never been one for melancholy (well, not much of it) yet he finds it getting to him, encroaching on his orderly mind, silence broken only by hoof beats on the well-beaten dirt trail.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If We Knew Then Now What We Know

The stillness is creeping, quiet, a hollowness permeating everywhere. There should be night birds, a lone coyote, anything to fill this void, hide the emptiness, the vastness of it all, on each side of him no matter where he turns. There should be something, at least.

He’s never been one for melancholy (well, not much of it) yet he finds it getting to him, encroaching on his orderly mind, silence broken only by hoof beats on the well-beaten dirt trail. Redbeard senses his uneasiness, he knows, can feel it in the way he pulls just slightly on the reins, urging his master to go faster.

Sherlock pulls him back, keeps him slow. They’ve nothing to hurry back to – no cases, no excitement, Irene left for Austin only a week ago, and could that be part of what’s bothering him? No Comique to drive away the restlessness with card games and deductions, other saloons already starting to fold without her to compete with, loss of the town’s appeal impacting everything else.

There’s a mist filling the hollows, space between ridges, giving the deceptive appearance of small lakes. He sees it, and files it idly away as something that he might well end up missing, though if he’s honest it reminds him of how the pyre smoke did the same thing only three years ago. It lingered for weeks while the fires still burned, and months later he could swear to the continued presence of that smell, horrendously unique to piles of cattle carcasses rendered into ash before burial beneath these very plains, legacy of foot and mouth.

(Beyond that ridge there’s a trench with two hundred steers buried deep with sulphur and quicklime, and if he chooses to look to his left he can almost see the flames again, from that year when it seemed the whole prairie was on fire.)

This land is woven into him, branded in his mind, scarred onto his shoulder, legacy of the bullet wound that could have killed him but didn’t. It seems wrong to leave here, somehow, though there’s nothing left, mines gone bust, ranches claimed by drought and hard times.

In the morning, he and John will put Mrs Hudson on the train to Cheyenne with the things that they’ve decided to keep. The important things they’ll carry in their saddle bags, bound for Prescott before they, too, head north, hoping to find something new, adventure, excitement, the life they’ve grown so accustomed to left behind in search of something more.

For now, though, there’s nothing for him to do except ride home, once more.


End file.
